Salt In the Wound (1962)

Original title: Il Dito Nella Piaga

Director: Tonino Ricci

Writers: Tonino Ricci, Piero Regnoli

Composer: Riz Ortolani

Starring: Klaus Kinski, George Hilton, Ray Saunders, Betsy Bell, Lanfranco Cobianchi, Enrico Pagani, Piero Mazzinghi, Ugo Adinolfi, Umberto Cecconi, Roberto Pagano

More info: IMDb

Tagline:  The ultimate mission...They needed men who fought like the devil and killed like wildcats.

Plot: An inexperienced American lieutenant and two American prisoners (who are about to be executed for murder) are the only force standing between advancing German troops and an Italian town that was "freed" by the trio.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

This started out as one movie and morphed into another.  Three soldiers escape a German attack and find their way into a sleepy Italian town where the townspeople treat them as liberators.  The trouble is there's no sign of anything German anywhere and no shots were fired.  There's no one in the streets until they suddenly emerge from their homes and businesses.  It's a stretch to believe that these three guys liberated the town.  This is when things slow down.  Kinski (as Cpl. Haskins) puts the make on a young woman and then finds a new purpose in stealing the church gold but all of this gets put on hold as the Germans attack the town and it's up to these three guys to save the day.  That's essentially the story.  There's a strong attempt at building tension early on when one of the three is on the right side (Lt. Sheppard played by Hilton) and the other two narrowly escaped being executed by the Army for murder.  That thread carries through the film and it's in the final moments when the two prisoners jump into the fight to save the town that they have their redemption of sorts.  Now that I'm talking about it, it feels like this movie could've been much better at working that angle of the story but it misses the mark.  The technical aspects of the picture are fine but it's the story as filmed that failed.  It's another case where it's not that bad a film but it's also not that good of one, either.